


madhuvat

by toujours_nigel



Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: F/M, Multi, Polyamorous Character, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Polyandry, once and future femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 09:07:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16489700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: It would have been difficult enough to be married once.





	madhuvat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).



“And on full-moon in Kartika he had us all together, said he missed the revels of his youth.”

“Oh you are wicked,” Draupadi said, “you must not tell me these things.”

“I shall not if it offends you,” Satyabhama answered, with the smile of an older sophisticate. “I had not intended it.”

“I am not offended. It is only... did none of you feel dishonoured to be so treated?”

“Perhaps Rukmini,” Satyabhama allowed, drinking deep. “She does not like even the possibility of being neglected. But it was not long a concern. Our husband... he moves as though there are many of him, one for each of his wives, even should their numbers grow. He is thus in all parts of our lives, but not many men have the trick of it in bed. Or so I’ve heard,” she finished, with a moue of elevated virtue that made Draupadi laugh.

“I have never heard of anything like this,” she said when she could.

“No? Your father has many wives, if only the one queen. And you yourself have many husbands.”

“I... I cannot ask such a thing of them!”

“No? Well, perhaps,” Satyabhama allowed. “They are brothers, I see your dilemma. A pity, with each so well-made, that you are trammelled about with these rules. If they take other wives, you might ask it of them then.”

“I will consider it,” she ventured, attempting her best imitation of her father’s coolest tone.

Perhaps she succeeded, or only in amusing Satyabhama, who abandoned her wine and upright posture and, reclining full length beside Draupadi’s mortified form, lowered demure eyelashes and said, “Remember, Krishnaa, your husband’s wives are yours as well. You must be his ardhangini even in this, and claim your share of their pleasures.”

Krishna, entering some time later with her husband, her brother-in-law, her... with Arjuna, took a startled look at Satyabhama laughing and Draupadi purple with mortification, and crossed the hall to sit at her side, soothing.

“Beloved,” he admonished, and it would have been more convincing if she could not feel him shaking with laughter with his arms around her, “you must not frighten our Panchali so. She is new to marriage, and new to this world.”

“I am only,” Satyabhama gasped, and gestured at him to wait till she caught her breath. “I am only telling her what she might expect of the marriage-bed, since she has no sisters or aunts to enlighten her, and Dasharni Uma has plainly failed at the task.”

“No wonder she can’t look me in the eye,” Krishna replied, and squeezed her closer. “You do what you will, and if you dislike anything you threaten to tell their mother. That should serve, eh Partha?”

When she managed to look up, Arjuna was every bit as scaldedly purple as her, and Satyabhama still smiling wickedly.

* * *

In a normal marriage it might have been a moment for the young lovers to join hands and turn their mortification into shy explorations of each other, but though she was wed but a month it was not this year to Arjuna. The question festered: her own mother was too docile and Drupada’s queen too formidable to ask, Shikhandi had but the one wife and Dhrishtadyumna none, and her mother-in-law was a widow of a dozen years’ standing with a husband cursed near all the years of their marriage. She might even have asked her brothers, had they been near her, but with Krishna and Satyabhama’s departure she was alone among the Pandavas, and it was scarcely a matter for a letter.

In the absence of an answer she found herself wondering how it might be, to see her husbands in congress with another woman, or to taste her wife’s mouth, her breasts, to see them together or to be tangled with them both, as Satyabhama must have, to speak of it so well. It entered into every encounter she had with them, though they behaved with a single exception as scrupulously as with any sister-in-law. Yet though she would have chafed at stricter laws after the freedoms of Panchal, though she found even the regulations with which she was ringed about often intolerable, she spent that month very aware of every glance, every word, every touch that ought to have been innocuous and was instead charged with possibility. They were all such well-made men: they had been handsome as beggars, as princes, anointed and fragrant, clad in rich cloth and flashing jewels, they were enchanting to every sense, and each unlike the other, such that she could not even think that she found one the best of his kind and the others pale imitations.

Her exception, her husband for the year, Yudhishtira, spent the month watching her of days with an amused smile that catalogued every flinch, every yearning movement she made away from or towards his brothers, and of nights touching her as though she was a problem to which he needed to know every solution.

She teased him on a morning when she was sated and still sleepless, saying, “I did not think to expect such behaviour from Dharmaraj Yudhishtira.”

He only parried her with, “Is it not dharma, for a husband to please his wife?” He had the Yadava eyes, deep-set and liquid, and a deftness of hand she should have expected from a man so fond of fondling dice but never thought to. His touch raised a line of fire down her spine, and she fell back languorous into the sheets and tugged him down after her.

The morning after, he came up behind her as she sat watching his brothers spar, her own hand curved useless around the hilt of her dagger. At home in Kampilya she fought with Uma, and sometimes Shikhandi, or the captain of her mother’s guard. His hand on her shoulder in a careful clasp still shivered memories through her and his smile when she glanced up was laced with his own satisfaction.

But he said only, “Come spar with me. I favour the spear and neglect combat at close-quarters. You shall not find me an overwhelming foe.”

“What incentives do you offer, that I should engage in such fruitless effort?”

He shook his head in sudden memory, like a horse twitching off a fly. “Queen Madri would tell us that we had been born because my father demanded a son when he beat them in a race or hunt or game. I will not emulate him in this. We will trade honesty.”

“Are you not always honest? A disadvantage in this game.”

“Or one you cannot hope to match. Very well. If I win I shall ask you a question, and you must answer honestly. If you win you may ask a boon of me.”

He had the advantage of her in height and reach, but not in practice, surprising though she found it. His brothers cleared a circle for them and stood offering advice, to him as often as to her. He fought... he fought better than she had expected, as well as her brothers, if not as well as his own: with a narrow concentration she had not seen him bring to any other study but that of her body, and enough aggression to make his scant advantages suffice for victory.

He was a gracious victor, and a good hunter, and when he raised his mouth from her body in the small hours three nights thence and said, “You look at my brothers because you wonder how it would be to have them in my place,” it felt like admitting very little to nod in agreement, and push him down to his task with a hand wrapped in his hair.

It was only later that she realised her mistake, when at dinner he leaned in where she sat sharing an attendant with his mother and whispered, “Do you think Nakula’s riding prowess would translate well?”

After that it became something of a game, for him to suggest what she might do with his brothers or describe how they might enjoy her. He said the most outrageous things with equal ease at mealtimes, in brief respites from the work of governance, and in bed in her arms, simply as though revisiting an long-running conversation as and when a new thought entered his mind. He would speak in the same breath of turning forests into farmland and how like Annapurna she would look with rice spilled down her hair and between her breasts, of the correct time for a yajna and how Sahadeva might spread her out under the stars he so liked watching.

Even Satyabhama for all her easy speech had found the matter of brothers an obstacle, and yet her husband, who was so constantly concerned about dharma, found it no impediment at all. When she asked him he said, frowning, giving it and her consideration, “They are your husbands, so it doesn’t render you unchaste to think of them thus. They are my brothers, but I am speaking of what they might do only with you, so it is no dishonour to them. I do not myself desire them, so it breaks none of the great laws. It brings you pleasure, and so it in no way violates my dharma as your husband. It brings me pleasure, and that only incites me to bring you more.”

It had been Yudhishtira, after all, who persuaded her father to give his daughter to five husbands. It was Yudhishtira, after all, who was famed for his way with words, his interpretations of the law. She was too much a Panchalan to put a stop to anything that pleased her and hurt none she needed protect.

And oh, it pleased her, and he pleased her, with his deft hands and his deft words and his deft mind that was a perfect match for hers, a gracious teacher and loving friend, happy to guide her in philosophy and in pleasure, happy to watch her learn skills from his brothers or whisper how she might learn more in later years. In the kitchen and storehouse he spoke of Bhima, in the stables of Nakula, under the stars of Sahadeva, and in their private armoury of Arjuna: how he held his bow like a lover, how arrows sang in his hand, how he had risked their disguise and very lives for a chance to gain her love.

They lay down in the little chamber beyond it, where the princes often rested after practice or in pious meditation before it, Draupadi frantic for love and Yudhishtira caught with her in Kama’s snare.

“When you saw him in his mendicant guise,” he said, leaning up to pour honeyed words in her ear as he pushed his body within hers, “his arms straining with the great bow, Princess, did you think how his arms might strain soon with the effort of holding back his passion for you? How those archery calluses might feel against your nipples? Did you?”

“No... I... _oh_.”

“Oh? Well, you were... new to the world... and untaught... perhaps you thought only of him holding you in his arms. Perhaps,” he said, and his pace faltered and he withdrew. “Perhaps you wish even now to be only with him and lament your fate, for you were won by him, and by my mother’s words and mine bound to us. Do you, Panchali, wish I had found other words, supported your father and not my mother, safeguarded your marriage to my brother and not...”

“I would have changed my fate if I wished it,” she interrupted, surprised and still aching for him. “Many men never see the women they marry for policy, and you were beggars with my brothers’ army at your door. You cannot blame me for my love of Arjuna when it runs like a silver thread through your life. I am your wife this year and would be content, save that you are now derelict in your duty to me.”

He smiled. It was not a habitual thing: its creases were not marked on his skin though he had lived thirty years. When she raised her hand to touch its slight curve he took it in his and kisses her palm, her fingertips and, still holding on, went to his knees in front of her. “I will train all my thought on you, and my mouth to better use than speech.”

* * *

It was Bhima who came to her with the news of Arjuna leaving, and she wondered even through her panic what it meant, that less than a year into her marriage her husbands knew to send their strongest to her with news of adversity. Older, she might have commented on it acidly, but she was nineteen and her knees shook and Bhima took her in his arms and handed her down to a seat as gently as he might with a little sister.

“I must go to him,” she said when she could next speak.

He shook his head. “Princess, I would deny you nothing, but he has not been shy in telling us the reasons for his departure; he heard you when he entered the armoury.”

Oh. _Oh_. “Do you think me shameless?”

“Princess, you are a new bride. I think the world entire ought to be your bedchamber.” He cupped her cheek in one hand and grinned when she met his gaze. “May the night be honey-sweet for us. May the morning be honey-sweet for us. May the earth be honey-sweet for us. May the heavens be honey-sweet for us. May the plants be honey-sweet for us. May the sun be all honey for us. May the cows yield us honey-sweet milk. Did you not say it, when you walked with us?”

“But he is leaving, and if I do not stop him the fault is mine.”

“He is the one who believes hearing voices is an intrusion, Princess. Go to him if you wish, Yudhishtira is pleading with him already, make of it a chorus if you choose.”

“But you do not advise it?”

It was Bhima, this time, who nearly averted his eyes and then thought better of it. “It is an Yadava skill, to make words do one’s bidding: our cousin excels in it, but our mother has a trick of making her own will synonymous with justice in the world, and Yudhishtira of turning known truths on their head and spinning them like a child’s tops till they turn the world in their orbit. Arjuna has none of that skills, but he is constant in the pursuit of his own truths, and it only Krishna who at times can sway him.”

“What would you do?”

“Lock him in a room,” Bhima said promptly and laughed at her horror. “And turn him loose to go wandering if he still wished it in the morning. When we were children they would often have these fits of melancholy, these brothers bracketing me, and sit about and accuse themselves of failing each other or their own principles. Honour weighs heavily on them.”

“And you?”

“I would do the work that needed to be done. I am a simple man, and for me honour lies in protecting my own.”

“Does that not weigh you down?” He had fled Varanavat with them clinging to him, borne them through forests in his arms, hunted and scrounged food, watched over their sleep. She knew it all, but from Sahadeva.

“Princess,” he said, still smiling. “You are my family. Bearing your weight is what I live for.”

* * *

Yudhishtira shunned her bed, at which she would have taken grave offence had he not shunned also rest and food and the company of his brothers. His boar spear gathered dust with his dice, and the King of Indraprastha sat everyday in court from sunrise till sundown, determined to do justice for his people.

“Honour weighs heavy,” Sahadeva said, as though he like Bhima had been taught the words when young, but as though unlike Bhima he found them an inadequate explanation.

Nakula, nodding, added, “He sees it as his own crime, in not having already prevented the theft before it happened. Brother has many such charming delusions, and an ability to assume guilt that is not his.”

“It keeps him from accepting guilt when it truly is his own,” Sahadeva finished.

They had the ability of speaking as though they were one voice in two mouths that had so infuriated Shikhandi about his siblings, and made Draupadi long for her twin, half her voice and half her mind. But Sahadeva at least, had something more, some deeper meaning in his words.

“Has he done so?”

“Oh, no. Our brother is an instrument of fate, and of ancestral wishes, and of the consequences of actions helplessly taken. Have you not seen that already, bhagini, bharyya?”

“I am not displeased that he was a vessel of fate in that moment.”

“Nor are we.”

“How could we be, when it brought us you?”

She spent her nights alone and her days with them often in conversation about their plans for the cattle-wealth of Indraprastha. Even with Khandava tamed by fire it was land easier to turn to pasture than to seed. The newest settlers were like their kings displaced from earlier homes by need or loss, and none capable of farming great enough tracts to make fragment compensate for fertility.

“It would take them years to earn a living,” Draupadi said when they had laid the matter out for her.

“We could give them years,” Nakula said. “We have the wealth for it. We could trade with Kashi or Panchal for grain, and let our people store what they grow to seed greater fields.”

“But there are the ploughs to think of, and bullocks, and the question of distribution and of granaries, and if we are to get bullocks at all, then we might as well get larger herds and give them out to our people, let them scratch out their own farms in time.”

“Besides,” Draupadi said with the great satisfaction of interrupting their patter, “you are all Yadavas and can think of nothing better than to drive a thousand-head of cattle through your lands.”

“Only our elders, and not us. In Madra they go in for horses, the finest horses, to supplement their poorer farmlands.”

“But we will tell everyone it is because we are Yadavas, as our queen has declared.”

“I did not mean it as a goad,” Draupadi said.

“We are not animals, to be so easily goaded,” Nakula replied, and patted her hand, soothing. “But it is a plausible answer, and a better reason than our own.”

“It is what they do in Anga, which has forests and elephants and cows, and little enough arable land. And which was Hastinapura’s, then Duryodhan’s, then Karna’s, and to reveal the source of the plan would set our brothers against it. You understand.”

She did, about unreasoning anger like a bonfire scorching one’s heart, and the need to walk around it. “Will they believe you?”

“We are all truth-tellers, why should they not? The royal herd is Yadava, any new animals we bring in must be as well, since we cannot trade with Anga.”

“There’s Matsya as well, where they have a new King and never any contact with Hastinapura.”

“What a pain it is, Panchali, to fit out a new kingdom.”

“Let me help. I know nothing of cows, but we have had in Panchal need to reorganise our resources in recent memory.”

“We know,” one of the reasons for it assured her, and another laughed.

* * *

They had news of Arjuna at the end of the fortnight, reports filtering in of a young ascetic, very dark, with a bow slung over a shoulder and an aim that never faltered from true, heading south past Hastinapura and moving fast. After that it came in drips and floods, here a village saved, there a wedding feast attended. In a month he had moved into Anga.

“He’ll like that, the young fool,” Bhima commented when she told him of it. “Here, have a taste.”

He had been two days hunting, and had missed the messenger-dove, had come back with meat he would not divulge the provenance of. She ate obediently, if with less relish than Nakula and Sahadeva.

“Roast it longer,” Sahadeva said, “and be more generous with the honey.”

“What will he like,” Draupadi asked, impatient with their attention to food when she needed them to enter into her concerns.

“Being the stranger who saves Karna’s subjects while he’s licking Duryodhan’s feet, of course.”

“Do they truly hate each other?”

“As much as Arjuna has it in him to hate,” Nakula said.

“It is grievous that he cannot recognise the nature of what he feels,” added Sahadeva.

“He feels for the suta as I do for Duryodhan,” Bhima said with a tone of finality. “But you carried news of Arjuna to me for some reason of your own.”

“Yes. How good are your spies, if they cannot bring us a steady stream of news?”

They laughed, longer than she liked, and in concert.

“I cannot attest to their quality relative to those in Panchal’s employ,” Sahadeva said eventually. “They are worse than those of our cousins the Yadavas, and better than those of our cousins of Hastinapur. It is not the quality of the hunter, but the quality of the quarry.”

“That he lets us have any news of him is because he is a dutiful son, who knows how Mother worries,” said Bhima. “What need has Arjuna, of villages and companions, when he has his bow with him? He could live out his exile in forests and we would never find him.”

“We hid two years from Hastinapura,” Nakula said, “all six of us, and with our brother Bhima who slew monsters where he found them.”

“Pray you never find out how well we hide in need.”

* * *

Whatever the competence of the informants, and Draupadi could not believe it great, in the second week of the second month of his absence there came news that Arjuna was in a village past the borders of Anga, had taken and repaired a hut left empty after a cowherd tried saving calves from a tiger, that the tiger’s head decorated his door and its pelt his bed.

Draupadi took the news to Yudhishtira as he emerged from the Council Hall, and took his hands in hers.

“I have work,” he said, “there are things I must think before tomorrow, a new problem that was posed to me today. Panchali, I...”

“Tell me of it, let my mind walk this labyrinth with yours. If I am your dharmasangini, if I am queen in Indraprastha, I have a share in your work.”

“If I had known of that man’s plight, Arjuna would be with us now.”

“You have left me mourning the absence of two husbands for something none of us could have foretold or stopped. Is it punishment?”

“Penance,” Yudhishtira said, and offered her a smile that betrayed his lack of practice. “If I live as I was before Arjuna left I seem to delight in his departure. Yet if you think it a punishment I appear to chastise you for what I do not believe was your fault. But then to return to your bed when you distract me even unto the negligence of my duties is in itself a negligence of my duties. And...”

She stopped his mouth with a kiss, surprising herself but not, she saw upon withdrawing, as much as she had surprised him. “You have done your duty as a king. Now come do your duty to your wife.”

When the lamps had drunk all their oil and her eyes were drooping shut he said, “My father was a conqueror. They say he was a good king, though he did not rule long. I never saw it; born as we were in the forest perhaps we never could have. Yet I believe the nature of a leader shines forth no matter how few his people number, and all the work of our camp fell upon my mother’s shoulders. My father, the famed King Pandu, he was always yearning for what he could not gain, and Queen Madri wanted him enough she left her children in my mother’s care and followed him into the afterlife. Since I came to the age of reason I have known how love of a woman can blind a man to his responsibilities: you may see it too often in my own family. When we brought you home, and Mother spoke as she did, it seemed to me a way to stay on the path of honour, ensure that any tie to you would only strengthen our ties to each other. But now I wonder, in my obedience to Mother and my hope for unity, did I wrong you, or my brothers, or act from simple lust for you? If I so did, ought not I give up hope of my happiness with you, that I may better serve my family and my people?”

“If you forsake me, am I still Queen in Indraprastha,” she asked, and tapped his mouth shut when he sought to respond. “And in being queen am I your helpmeet in ruling your people? If I am, could I be a just ruler when myself unhappy, or would I neglect them and tend to my sorrow, or reset their happiness in finding my life lacking? Then, too, there are other loves than that between husband and wife that may be as blinding: the love of a father for his son, or of a king for his own status, or of a man for his brothers. You may look to your family, or to mine, and find proof of it, in your uncle and my father and even in Devavrata Bhishma your Pitamaha.”

When she released him he turned and took her in his arms, his eyes gleaming even in the dying, shuddering light. “You would sorrow without me?”

* * *

In time they had news that Arjuna had tarried with a princess of the Nagas, and left without waiting to hear what came of their joining. Their messenger had waited and, she knew not by what means, had learnt that she had conceived a child. Plainly they were as competent as their masters believed, these spies of Indraprastha. Arjuna by then had left the banks of the Ganga where she found him and walked into forests sparse with people; for further news of father or child they would have to wait some months.

Bhima, whose wife she was that year, found Draupadi in the nursery with Prativindhya, and swept them both onto his lap, kissing her hair and his nephew’s with indifferent abandon. Prativindhya tired of it quicker than her, toddled around in circles, proud to exhibit this new skill to adult appreciation, and growing restless was scooped up by a nurse and hurried away for a meal or the unfailing amusements of watching horses being ridden in their enclosure or infant Shatanika sleeping in his cradle.

Draupadi turned in her husband’s encircling arms and wept, his hands soothing in her hair and on her back. “Surely it ought not hurt so deeply, when so much time has passed and I am happy?”

“A reopened wound will often cause the greatest pain, Princess. See here,” he said and pressed her hand to a seamed scar on his shoulder. “I got this six years ago, fighting in the Kamyaka Forest. It reminds me every winter that I might have perished and my family with me, but that I won, and instead became a father when I might have become a meal.”

“Do you bid me take it as a good sign, that it hurts?”

“A sign that you are living. This wound, it binds us closer, that we have not seen him in near three years, that he has nephews he does not know, that we might soon have one we never meet. Your husband, my brother, the hero of the Pandava clan. You knew him two months before he left. If you ache so deep... I was three when he was born, or a little older. Those three years, and these three, are all the time I have ever spent away from him; Nakula and Sahadeva have never known life without him.”

“It has been three years since I’ve seen my brothers,” she said, startled out of her sorrow. “Women are taught to prize their spouse higher than any brother, you must forgive me if I forget and think the same true for men.”

“You are the equal of any of us,” Bhima insisted, easy as though it were plain truth to him, and kissed her forehead and the red parting of her hair. “I cannot offer you the bargain you have offered the Saivya princess, but of a certainty you might visit Kampilya. If you tire of my company there are villages there that might yet remember me.”

“And Kamyaka Forest, on a swift horse, is less than a week’s journey,” Draupadi said, and kissed his cheek in gratitude, once and then again, still unused after two months to its smoothness. It was like kissing a girl’s or a child’s, the skin innocent of even a suspicion of stubble. “Shall I ride with you, and meet your wife?”

“Princess, you only need look in a mirror these nine months,” Bhima laughed and then rumbled, “You would meet Hidimbi?”

“If you and she think it fitting. Your son must be five, now.”

“You must not be surprised if he looks far older than his years. They are a race of shapeshifters. They are not hideous even to princely eyes, unless they choose to intimidate their foes.”

“I am certain she is imposing,” offered Draupadi, puzzled, and when Bhima would not meet her gaze set her nails against his skin and pressed down. “Do you think I make these bargains from jealousy or fear that my husbands might find other wives lovelier?”

“Only that your foolish husbands will come to love best those wives they may love most securely, should they have the chance,” he said, and took her hand from his throat and kissed it. “You need not fear that with Hidimbi, however lovely she might appear, or valiant. Her valour is for the people she leads, and her truest love for the son she asked from me in place of the brother I slew.”

“We will go to Panchal,” she said, turning her hand in his to grasp it. “We will ride out with the Dharmaraj as he goes to meet his bride, and instead ride to Kampilya with my sons, that they might meet their grandfather and uncles. If their fathers agree you may take them to the forest to meet their eldest brother, or if the ride is too fatiguing for Shatanika bring your son to Ekachakra that they might meet. I would meet your wife and delight in her, if she agrees to a bargain.”

“She will want no part of your palace, Princess, rest content.”

“When you meet her, Vrikodara, you must tell her our wife that I wish the night we meet honey-sweet for us, and the morning after it honey-sweet, and even the sun all honey for us.”


End file.
